The Gage Hotel

Alfred S. Gage was a Vermonter who came to Texas in 1878 to help his brother survey and sell land, and who ended up with one of the great ranching operations of the Trans Pecos. He was living in San Antonio by 1900 and became a banker there, president of the Lockwood National Bank and of the city water company, and he built the ranch from that end rather than the other way round: in 1913 he bought out his fellow stockholders and merged holdings into the A. S. Gage Ranch, which grew to some five hundred thousand acres. What he lacked was somewhere to work from when he was out west. In 1926 he bought lots at Marathon and commissioned Henry Trost of Trost and Trost in El Paso, and the hotel opened on 1 April 1927. He had a little over a year to use it. Gage died in San Antonio in June 1928 of complications after an appendicitis operation. The building went through the long decline that came to every small railroad hotel once people stopped arriving by train, until J. P. Bryan and Mary Jon Bryan bought it in 1978 and finished a restoration in 1982, which is why it survives when almost none of its contemporaries on this line do. Its position has quietly reversed: a hotel built to run a cattle empire now serves people driving to Big Bend, a national park that did not exist until 1944, forty miles south down what is now US 385.